Critics reviews

Mokri has cited American slasher movies and the drawings of M.C. Escher as his primary influences for the film. The movie feels exactly like a fusion of those things: the setup recalls The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but the execution is almost impossibly tricky... I'm not sure whether Mokri has something more serious on his mind than playing an elaborate game; but even if Fish & Cat is just a game, it's an engrossing, highly original one.

The tone remains ominous throughout, with the two thugs and a third accomplice intruding at intervals, perhaps with murderous intentions. There’s also plenty of dark humor as well, and despite the slow unrolling of the action, the film remains absorbing throughout. Some viewers will be tempted to see the film on DVD/BD again, trying to work out the complicated looping chronology of the plot–possibly diagramming it, as the filmmakers presumably had to.

There was one competition title that was outright revelatory. I speak of Shahram Mokri’s delightful, perplexing second feature, Mahi va Gorbeh (Fish and Cat). Was it really, as claimed, filmed in only one two hour-plus long shot? It both gives, and confounds, that very impression throughout, through a playful, Möbius strip-like approach to spinning a shaggy dog tale, folding in on itself at regular intervals by replaying earlier scenes with significant shifts of point-of-view.

The film passes through a series of phases and moods, from youth romance to murder mystery to full-on art film, as the camera loops through the woods only to end up where it was a moment ago, and a scene starts over again but with an entirely different perspective. This is truly ambitious filmmaking, a head-scratcher in a way that is riveting and refreshing.

Shahram Mokri’s Fish & Cat (2013) shows promise for new Iranian cinema, as one of the more mysterious and genre defying films at this year’s ND/NF... Though the two presumed perpetrators act like hapless stooges, and their peripatetic encounters with people meandering in the woods... betray absurdist touches, the film, captured in one continuous shot, builds tension with each exchange.

The movie jumps back several times more and, as it leaps from character to character, from one point of view to the next, it adds a new piece of the puzzle (and, alas, a slaughtered bird). It’s a tour de force — the cinematographer is Mahmoud Kalari, who shot “A Separation” — and as quietly political as it is brazenly cinematic.

This diversion, or repression, of audience expectations makes the film a commendably surreal experience, but the overabundant display of theory in motion doesn't translate into a wholly satisfying one. The film is a game: Mokri challenges his viewers to grip parallel narrative threads in what feels like suspiciously real time, rather than to assemble or contextualize any metaphorical ones.

An ambitious, daunting, almost commendable show of technical prowess from Iranian director Shahram Mokri... The film’s early moments do build an air of morbid curiosity around the proceedings, but as sequences circle back on each other and are re-staged from various angles, whatever tension that Mokri is able to establish is deflated by meandering passages of dialogue and overwrought asides.